Database

The Best of the First Half

The most popular articles of the first half of the year, sprinkled with a few pieces carefully chosen by the editors.

Our coverage in the first half of 2013 reflects one of the most important trends in computing: the emergence of so-called "big data." In fact, data has always been big relative to our capacity to understand it, but today new tools make it possible for desktop machines and small clusters to do deep data mining and analytics very inexpensively. It's certainly possible that in a few years, all business programmers will be expected to have working knowledge of big data analysis using NoSQL databases and tools such as Hadoop. To this end, we presented one of the first ever multi-part tutorials on Hadoop, written by the folks who developed it. We also were the first publication to have a multi-part series on programming the Intel Phi, which surely represents the kind of silicon that will routinely be used in big data processing.

Apart from big data, we also explored our traditional fascination with programming languages, books, and, of course, the Jolt Awards.

Is there anything we missed that you'd really like to see covered? Drop me a line (my address is below) and let me know. We're gearing up to deliver more good content for the second half of the year, so this would be an ideal time to send me your requests and preferences. Thank you!

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Video

This month's Dr. Dobb's Journal

This month,
Dr. Dobb's Journal is devoted to mobile programming. We introduce you to Apple's new Swift programming language, discuss the perils of being the third-most-popular mobile platform, revisit SQLite on Android
, and much more!